The lack of crash accountability or crash weighting in the DOT’s Compliance, Safety, Accountability program is unfair to carriers, said one of the FMCSA’s top dogs at Overdrive sister publication CCJ’s Spring Symposium this week in Birmingham, Ala.
Jack Van Steenburg, the agency’s chief safety officer, while admitting the point long-argued by the trucking industry, the Government Accountability Office and some lawmakers, did not however offer any specifics as how the agency could incorporate crash accountability into CSA scores.
And even if it could, it likely would only cover crashes that are “real obvious ones,” Van Steenburg said.
“It’s not fair to the industry. I’ll come out and say it,” Van Steenburg told the audience of trucking company managers and executives. “We recognize we have to do something for the industry.”
Currently, CSA dings carriers and their percentile rankings in the safety program for all crashes, even those that are in no way the fault of the carrier or the driver — one of the main points of contention with the industry and FMCSA’s program since its initiation in 2011.
Earlier this year, FMCSA released the results of a study in which it concluded crash accountability would not improve carrier rankings in the system and would be too cumbersome and difficult to implement.
